Bury Me Deep (23 page)

The characters that emerged bear many surface similarities to their real-life counterparts but are ultimately fictions. Like Marion
Seeley, Winnie Ruth Judd was left in Phoenix by her doctor husband, William Judd, whose drug addiction led him to work for a mining company in Mexico. Dr. Seeley’s fate, however, diverges wildly from that of the real-life Dr. Judd’s, although it is inspired by his paternal loyalty to her. Like Louise Mercer, Anne LeRoi was a nurse at the same clinic where Winnie Ruth Judd worked and various details of her employment are the same. Jack Halloran was, like Joe Lanigan, married with children and was a successful businessman and pillar of the community, but the rest is pure fiction. Ginny Hoyt, other than the tuberculosis she shares with Sammy Samuelson, is an invention. Press reports delineating the contents of Miss Samuelson’s diary, however, include excerpts from the poem “The Teak Forest,” which appears at the beginning of Part Four, as well as various song lyrics and verses throughout the novel.

Because we have only Mrs. Judd’s accounts of the murders themselves and because her recollection of Anne LeRoi’s death has always been dim, this novel’s version of those events is heavily imagined. Many of the details leading up to the murders, however, draw extensively from Winnie Ruth Judd’s accounts, from interviews, testimony and her late-in-life conversations with author Jana Bommersbach. For instance, one of the precipitating factors in the women’s fight that Friday night was Anne LeRoi’s and Sammy Samuelson’s anger that Mrs. Judd had invited a new nurse at the clinic out for an evening with Jack Halloran, at Halloran’s suggestion. The accusations the women made (e.g., that the nurse had syphilis) are drawn from Mrs. Judd’s accounts, as is Ginny’s sudden rage.

Finally, the question of how the women’s bodies ended up in those famous trunks that so captivated public attention draws on Mrs. Judd’s account that Mr. Halloran told her Sammy Samuelson’s body had been “operated on.” According to at least one source, the doctor rumored to have carried out the dismember
ment appeared at the prison in which Mrs. Judd was being held after her trial, “drunk as a skunk, waving his hat around and yelling he was the only man alive who knew the truth about the Winnie Ruth Judd case.” A few months later, in June 1932, the doctor died of a heart attack.

The story of Winnie Ruth Judd, Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson is actually a hundred stories or more. Researching it, I came upon so many “side” tales, moments large and small, that lingered with me. Moments like this small, haunting story that appears in
The Trunk Murderess
:

Virginia Fetterer, the daughter of an Arizona legislator, recalled to the author a long-ago New Year’s Eve in the late 1930s when she came upon Happy Jack Halloran, Mrs. Judd’s betraying lover, at the Adams Hotel in downtown Phoenix.

It was a night of jubilation, with street bands, and “everyone wandered around drinking and dancing and visiting with friends in a town where everybody knew everybody.” Ms. Fetterer and her friends approached the Adams Grill, the hotel bar, and Halloran and his friends were coming out:

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The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd by Jana Bommersbach, Scottsdale, Ariz.: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003.